Fast-forward a year and I'm thinking about buying a new Windows laptop (to go with my Apple desktop). I buy a semi-top-of-the-line machine that can run Half-Life 2 at full res 60-fps blah blah blah. And what's the first thing I install? The Secret of Money Island.

The ability to play the game is thanks to the fantastic people involved in ScummVM, a virtual machine that can handle and run games written in the Scumm engine (mostly old LucasArts games but it now incorporates a few others). ScummVM works with Vista, Secret of Monkey Island works in ScummVM, voila! I'm playing a 14 year old game in my brand-new laptop. And I'm LOVING it.

All the old music floods back to me, the world of Monkey Island seems strangely familiar. Even homelike. Every new screen was greeted with a "Oh yea!" type of moment as I remembered little bits here and there. Flying Fetuccini brothers want to pay you to let them shoot you out of their circus cannon but won't let you do it without a helmet? Easy, steal the pot from the chef's kitchen in the Scumm Bar. Need to help a convict escape? Just pour that acidic Grog that the pirates drink all over the lock.

Some of these things I instantly remembered, others came back hours (or days later). It's like a delayed version of remembering how to ride a bike.

Sadly, it's not a long game. I took my time and it lasted a little over 5 hours. But the humor and wit still stand up, and by today's standards it's not an easy game to figure out. There's not as much hand-holding as you get these days. In fact a few times there are puzzles where the answers are just a result of trying to use every inventory item till something works. It's a bump in the road, stopping the game from being perfect, but it's hard to hold this game accountable since most of these types of games did this back then. It's a rewarding game that even playing again all these years later, still stands as my favorite game of all time.

It's amazing to me that with the recent resurgence of pirate love out there (thanks to Pirates of the Caribbean) that a new Monkey Island isn't in the works. Hell, release a compilation of the old ones! A point and click adventure like this would be PERFECT on the Nintendo DS. I know we've seen some hombrew attempts out there and people have it running on everything from the DS to the iPhone, but I want to see something official dammit!

C'mon Lucasarts, you're wasting a golden opportunity to repackage these old point and click classics. Some of the old CD-Rom packs on ebay are selling for a few hundred bucks because people want to have these games so bad. Why sit on them when people so obviously want them?

After a bit of digging you can get yourself a copy of Monkey Island off of Ebay for less than $30 if you're not picky about the packaging... just make sure you get the CD-Rom version (the music is far superior). After that the ScummVM program is free and has a fantastic and dedicated community with all sorts of tips and tricks for getting the games to run properly. Just don't ask for help in finding or running a pirated version of the game. They're not interested (and neither are we).

For the record it also came out for the SegaCD.

Comments (2)

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written by Muffin Man, May 23, 2008

The secret of Monkey Island is too retro for me, just can't get into it. Loved Curse of Monkey Island though

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written by TheBBPS.com (Bits, Bytes, Pixe, February 10, 2009

[...] love old school adventure games. Lucasarts especially and to a lesser extent Sierra blazed a trail through the late 80s and early 90s with [...]

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